blue-lilting mint-vintage reddish glow
by zigCARNIVOROUS
Summary: Sunday has a feeling. Preview the private thoughts that blossom in the Professional Relationship between Special Agents. Take a dip in bonding plasmas, the rarer state of matter. Have at it.
1. Call

Albert, arriving home to his utilitarian apartment, sees a red light blinking in the room before he hits the overhead lightswitch. Albert depresses the button on his answering machine before hanging his trenchcoat. He expects a work message. It's a co-worker's voice saying, "Good evening, Agent Rosenfield. This is Agent Cooper."

Albert freezes in his path toward the kitchen, looking askance at the machine. He's met Cooper at the office and down in the lab a bare handful of times. Cute. Whacked in the membrane, but cute. Sharp in dress and observation.

 _This guy_ Albert nods and lights up as Special Agent Dale Cooper's boyish voice fills the room, calm as his blue-lilting streams of cigarette smoke. "It is ninety-nine degrees at twilight in Philadelphia. There is a reddish glow in the sky tonight, Agent Rosenfield. I have heard that this atmospherical phenomenon indicates the delight of sailors."

Albert squints at his answering machine.

"The first star I see tonight– whup noo, that's Venus, nevermind…" Cooper pauses. Albert opens the window. There are no stars, no moon in the blackness above the streetlamps. Cooper's serene voice follows Albert on a sudden mission to retrieve his morning paper from the recycle bin in the kitchen. Top of front page, listed by the date and weather forecast, are the minute-exact times of sunrise and sundown today. Albert flashes himself his watch. If twilight extends for no more than a half hour after sundown that would boil down the estimate on the time of Cooper's call to almost three hours ago. Cooper is saying, "I hope you don't mind me calling you at home, Agent Rosenfield. I still had your business card in the coat I was wearing," a smile in his voice, "When we met."  
 _  
he's been thinking about me all day  
everytime he put his hand in his pocket  
Agent Cooper's mint-vintage Armani trench  
_Albert grunts under his breath. _  
patent leather shoes were scuffed today_

Must be the overtime-jet-lag from his labwork causing Albert's eyebrows to knit; antsy from the coffee or something. Can't be Cooper's voice, so lax it sounds like the man must have been lying on the floor for this call.

Cooper: "You said… "  
Albert can hear his dazed smile growing,  
"I could… "  
and growing  
"… _go ahead…"_

Albert glares at the machine. Flashes himself his watch again. "Spit it out, Coop!"

Albert has a mini-technicolor-vision of Coop  
 _splayed casually on his floor with his shirt open under thick undulating streams of smoke  
the long long coil of the receiver cord draped loosely around one or two limbs _

Cooper clears his throat on the message, begins again,  
"You said I could go ahead, and at this point you _whipped_ your card at me, Agent Rosenfield, and invited me to call you whenever I felt the…  
"'Lack of professional integrity' in my life...?  
"And by 'whenever,' you said you meant 'anytime.'  
"But that it had better be damn-near tantamount to catastrophe, as you have far better and nobler things to do with your time than…  
"'Hold the hand of every twerpie goon who can't find the door.'  
"Which was right behind me, as you indicated at this point…  
"Or was it 'goonie twerp'?"

There is a soft muffle sound. A few seconds' pause.  
Albert cogitates.

 _he muffled the receiver with his hand  
_

Cooper clears his throat again after another almost imperceptible whoosh and Albert knows it's true.  
But why.

Albert is more than a little impressed with Agent Cooper's memory; an almost word-for-word recital of his rant at being interrupted down in the lab.  
He must have liked it, but in Albert's memory the man's expression was a tinge startled.  
 _  
still looks like a goon  
a hot goon  
stow it  
_  
That smile bleeding through the words, it's infectious.  
"And I'm glad you indicated the location of the door at the time, Agent Rosenfield, because you kind of… ahh...  
"Scare -scared me a little and I . . . _forgot where I was?_ Good one. _"_

This time Cooper's hand doesn't muffle the receiver quickly enough and Albert can hear him dissolving into stifled giggles. The machine cuts him off after six seconds of silence.

"Bahh!" Albert blurts at his ceiling.

[At Time Of The Call:  
Cooper takes his hand off the receiver, wipes wetness from his cheeks with his knuckles and says, "Hoo, gotta go!" Hangs up]


	2. Knock Knock

Albert knocks a crisp three times on the door. Then his hand dips back in the trenchcoat's blanketing posture, flicking the card with this apartment's number flourished upon it. Diane's elaborate india-ink cursive whorls in that pocket's darkness. Bitch didn't even look at what she was writing, her knowing/smug glare into Albert's eyes while her ink bled into the paper.

No need to check it again.

14 C.

Albert looks sideways at the corner of the hall he came from. Overhead light flickers. Something creepy about being the last door in the corridor _._ On the other side though, this faded, upside-down Bosch print is a nice touch for the stump end of a ghetto kill-chute.

 _Cute_  
 _dead end_  
 _why does he live in this dump_  
 _bureau doesn't pay_ this _bad  
_  
Enough time has elapsed, Albert raises his fist to knock again. But an intuition— _hey duh_ maybe this kind of tenant doesn't simply open the door to every midnight knocker—suddenly occurs to him.  
Albert knocks crispy-three again, and, professional voice, "Good evening. If I have the right apartment…! You called about the integrity…?"

 _no names_  
 _hey, I could be wrong_  
 _these doors have no peepholes_

Albert is looking sideways, down the way he came. Shrugs, nods, looks back at Cooper's peeling door for the beat of two.  
The must and the stank of decayed plaster causes a sudden tic; Albert wants to itch at his face and light a cigarette simultaneously.  
 _  
fuck this  
_  
Agent Rosenfield unconsciously tosses his head like hot-under-the-collar and strides away.  
 _  
"Albert?"_

It's soft.  
Could have been right in his ear.  
Albert looks over his shoulder.  
Dale Cooper's hand is a pale porcelain claw, hooked around the doorframe. Then his face. Barely real.  
Appears.

Albert says, "Hi."

Cooper's eyes sparkle in the shadow of his brow.  
He straightens in the doorframe.  
His head dips and one side of his mouth smiles, "Good evening."  
Albert blinks- something just happened very quickly on Cooper's face; he'll take it as a good sign. Like Coop tried to hide some giddy gulp of excitement just then.  
 _  
because I'm here  
he's going to-_

"Please come in," the hand invites, like holding an imaginary platter.


End file.
